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Harry Watkins and His Diary

If the career of any one man covered the range of American drama during the two decades before the Civil War, it was that of cocky Harry Watkins.
--Carl Bode

Harry Watkins (1825-1894) was an American stage actor, manager, and playwright. Despite his constant employment and collaborations with the most celebrated performers and producers of the day, including P. T. Barnum, Junius Brutus Booth, and Edwin Forrest, he never became famous. From 1845 to 1860, Watkins wrote religiously in his diary, detailing his daily activities, the roles he performed, the plays he saw, the people he met, the books he read, and his impressions of current events. This is the only known diary of its size and scope by an American actor during the decade prior to the Civil War.

A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century American Actor is a work-in-progress, seeking to make this fascinating diary available to researchers, students, and general readers in print and electronic format. At the conclusion of this project, we will have created a one-volume annotated print edition of his diary featuring the most widely relevant selections as well as a critical introduction providing historical context and biographical information. This edition will be accompanied by a digital edition (freely accessible to the public) of the full text of the manuscript, which will also showcase multimedia material related to subjects discussed in the diary (e.g., playbills, illustrations, photographs) and links to other resources.

Editorial Staff

Shane Breaux (Editorial Associate) holds an MA in theatre history and criticism from Brooklyn College and is currently working on a doctorate in theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he researches popular entertainments focusing on nineteenth and early-twentieth century blackface performance, musical comedy, and the formation of national identities through live performance. Shane is the former Managing Editor of Journal of American Drama and Theatre and is the co-founder and co-editor of Emerging Theatre Research, an online peer-reviewed journal for emerging scholars. Shane is also an active theatre maker working as a playwright, actor, dramaturg, and director. Shane grew up in Lake Charles, LA and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Dr. Scott D. Dexter (Director of Technology), Professor of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College, has long been intrigued by the many intersections between computing and the humanities. He is co-author of Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open-Source Software; he has received funding from the National Science Foundation to investigate programming, creativity and aesthetics, as well as computing and ethics; and he has implemented a Random Sonnet Generator for Robert Viscusi's epic sonnet cycle, Ellis Island. He is a 2013-14 Fellow of Brooklyn College's Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, where he is finishing a manuscript entitled The American Android: Sex, Suffrage, and Science Fiction. For the Harry Watkins Diary project, he is developing and maintaining the Drupal infrastructure and advising on XML and electronic publishing.

Sara Diaz (Research Assistant) is a Freshman College student in LaGuardia Community College. Her major is Liberal Arts in Humanities and Science. She plans to continue pursuing theater and wants to study Public Relations and Fundraising as her career.

Dr. Amy E. Hughes (Co-Editor) is Associate Professor of Theater History and Criticism at Brooklyn College (CUNY). She brings to this project technical skills developed at the Institute for Editing Historical Documents (coordinated by the Association for Documentary Editing) as well as expertise in antebellum US theater and culture. Her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), received the 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). The book investigates the relationship between the theater and visual, print, and material media in order to illuminate how spectacle was central to the “dramaturgy of reform” in the antebellum United States. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of American Culture, and Theatre Journal, among others, as well as two essay collections. In addition to serving as co-editor of A Player and A Gentleman, she is writing a monograph inspired by Watkins’s diary, tentatively titled An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century US America, which explores how Watkins’s account constitutes an “alternative theatre history” centered on the rhythms and realities of everyday life. For more information, visit her web page.

Christine Snyder (Editorial Assistant) is a first year MA Theater History and Criticism candidate at Brooklyn College. She graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University (San Diego) in 1997 with a double major in theater and journalism. She began writing a journal on January 3. 1992 and continues to keep it to this day.

Dr. Naomi J. Stubbs (Co-Editor) is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY). Her research interests include critical editing and nineteenth-century American theatre and popular entertainments, and her first book Cultivating National Identity Through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment was published with Palgrave in 2013. Her articles and chapters have appeared in Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America; The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall Gardens to Coney Island; Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology: Historical Interfaces and Intermedialities, and Popular Entertainment Studies. She is the Co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Stubbs completed her BA in English and Drama and MRes in Editing Lives and Letters and Queen Mary, University of London, and her PhD in Theatre at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Stubbs’s background in both critical editing and nineteenth-century American theatre and popular entertainments allows her to bring a variety of expertise crucial to the completion of this project.

Interns

We have relied greatly on the work of student interns, who received course credit for learning about transcription then transcribing a portion of the diary. See the For Educators page for more information on our approach.

Publications & Presentations

Invited Talk: “The Intermediality of Nineteenth-Century Melodrama,” a Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Workshop sponsored by the Mahindra Center for the Humanities, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Department of English, Harvard University. October 2015. (Hughes)

Conference Presentation: "Privileging the Common and Quotidian; or, How to Write a Biography of an Actor Who Never Became Famous." The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19) Conference, Durham, NC. March 2014. (Hughes)

Conference Presentation: “Form Follows Function: Drupal’s Role in Editing the Diary of Harry Watkins (1825-1894).” American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Dallas, TX. November 2013. (Stubbs, Hughes, and Dexter)

Conference Presentation: "The Lost (and Found) Diary of Harry Watkins: A New Perspective on Antebellum American Theater Culture." Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference. Boston, MA. January 2013. (Hughes)

This project has been made possible through awards and grants from CUNY (Collaborative Incentive Research Grant and PSC-CUNY Research Award programs), The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Society for Theatre Research (STR), Association for Documentary Editing (ADE), New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC), Leonard and Claire Tow Faculty Travel Fund (Brooklyn College), LaGuardia Community College's Department of English, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.